Weave progress

Today I took Mont to the indoor for my 4hrs of classes. I knew I would have a little time between classes to work his weaves, which was my main thing I wanted to work with him. We also practiced the chute as he hasn't seen that in who knows how long.

I set up 12 poles (I only currently have a set of 6 at home, I need to bring another set of 6 from the indoor to my house at some point soon) and put cages on 1 side. He did AWESOME!!! Towards the end of training I removed cages at either end to work on his entrance/exits and he did well with those too. We're moving right along. Couldn't be happier about it.

Weave Poles

Today Mont & I worked on his weave poles (and some start lines which went very well)

After him showing me he has a nice speedy, low to the ground, stide through the poles way of doing them with cages, I decided to take a cage off and train that.

He did great!

I took off the 1st cage on the left side of the poles.

He NAILED the entry every single time. When going the reverse direction it took him some time and well placed cookies to understand that the poles don't end where the cages end but that he needed to look for more poles and keep weaving until he ran out of poles, but in the end he got it and was doing great.

We worked on getting the entry from a jump 20' away in a straight line. And from a jump 20' away going on an arc.

I was VERY pleased with todays training session! Good boy Monty!

This blog has been idle far too long!

That's because I'm a slacker when it comes to training the corgi. He's such an easy dog to live with that I get complacent. BUT if I'm going to go to Nationals next year, I have to teach him some agility so tonight after I mowed the lawn, I set up a course that has lots of little sequences in it and started working Mont.

Today we worked on-

• start line stays
• weave poles
• tunnel dogwalk discrimination
• dog walk contacts

I need to go to Home Depot and get a 12' board for the teeter one of my students gave me for my yard. The base is pretty nice, just needs a painted and sanded board. I wish I had some rubber left over but that's all on the Maplewood equipment. Hopefully I will get to that either tomorrow or Tues.

His start line stays are coming along. He is now respecting the space game and if I push his space too hard he does a stress turn so I have to be careful. Before he would not respect my 'taking space' and stays were a constant battle. We did a lot of training this winter and spring on 'wait' at the back door and learning to respect my taking space and it is proving that it's transferring over away from the back door which is really good. We've also been practicing sit and wait for a release at the bogs before he gets to race off and play and romp and I think that type of wait in a high distraction high value situation is helping as well.

Weave poles right now have full cages on 6 poles (I need to bring a matching set of 6 and more cages home from the barn so I can practice on 12 poles) and he is driving into the poles, driving through them and driving out. He is able to drive into the poles from a jump going from about 9 o'clock to 3 o'clock.

Discriminations need much work. He is VERY dog walk focused. Well duh, it's got a high rate of reinforcement for the contact. So tonight we worked quite a bit on a push out to the tunnel. I had to baby sit it a lot, but we were able to end on a positive with a nice out to the tunnel where he really changed leads to get the out.

Dog walk contacts are going very well. He does a nice sit wait in the zone. We do need to work more on him waiting for his 'ok' release after getting his food reward though. As he has a tendency to think 'cookie = all done and I can go race off'

So I was happy with tonight's session with the Mont-a-monster. I am going to try to make a contentious effort to work with him a little bit each night. The course I have up now has nice serpentine and pin wheel options as well as some 'switch' and more discrimination.

1st trial of the year!

This weekend was the 1st agility trial of the year. My club, ACT-Up Agility was the host which meant I ended up working a lot. 1st was Friday set up day. Long day but nice to see lots of club members there helping and then tunnelers fun runs at the end of the day. I had James with me so he got to run the tunnelers course twice and he had a BLAST!!! He did so well I decided to enter him in 2 runs next weekend. (agility and James is a funny thing, sometimes he loves it and runs fast and clean, sometimes he's slow as cold molasses either case he's a goof on the field)

Saturday was the only day I entered. Due to financial constraints I only entered Niche, he was in all 6 classes. We near nearly finished with his Novice Versatility Superior title so once that's done we'll be in open and then Elite to work on his NATCH. Niche and I Qed in 5 out of the 6 runs. We had a knocked rail in Jumpers I cued the switch late and he dropped a back leg on the turn. He was also ticking bars in the 1st run of the day, Chances, but none came down. I found it strange that he was ticking, as he never does that, he usually has good jumping form and keeps the rails up with ease. I'll bet most if is related to the ear surgery he had last month and how out of structural alignment that made him, which is still getting adjustments to fix.

All in all I was happy with Niche's performance. We had some really nice runs- fast and clean and connected. Next weekend we have another trial, just Saturday also. With our 1st Elite class- Elite Tunnelers.

Happy Birthday Niche!

I can't believe the whirling dirvish is now 5. Kinda scary. Niche is a great dog, but boy does he have energy. He is my insomniac dog, literally, he just wants to be on the go, go, go all the time! Niche has an internal clock that is completely out of whack and has trained me well. He starts demanding supper at 2pm and wakes up at 4am expecting breakfast (well that never happens!). He is ALWAYS hungry and eats the most out of any dog in the house. Fastest metabolism in the East.

Niche still loves agility and is crazy excited that the weather has warmed up so we are back to practicing in earnest. Last year we added carting to our list of fun things to do and today as a present I got his cart and harness out of the basement and we practiced in the yard. He's even getting the hang of backing up while traced to the cart. Pretty cool!

I can't take him swimming though which his favorite all time birthday present as his stitches from a household altercation aren't coming out until Sat.

This year the flat coat specialty is in RI so it will be Niche's year to have a lot of fun. Planning to enter agility, conformation and field and possibly obedience.

Here's too a happy birthday for my BrownBoy and to many happy healthy years more!

Back to Work!

Well spring seems to be at least pretending to be here for the time being (we have had snow storms in April, so I'm not counting my chickens just yet!) and therefore my yard is clean of snow and actually suprisingly dry for this time of year. So it's time to get back to work with the boys! This winter I didn't really do much with anyone but Obi in terms of agility, and obedience.

I have been told that I need to go to the cardi national in PA next year. I keep hearing, "Katrin, it's sooooo close! You have to go!" from one J.G-P. friend of mine :-P But the only way I'm going is if I can actually compete in something and therefore I need to like um actually train the corgi on more than just house manners and kiddie stuff.

One thing I really, really want to do more of is herding. I have one student who comes to agility class as a drop in with her 2 dogs, and the fee she pays me would pay for a herding lesson and the travel to there, and I keep thinking that would be "my" money as opposed to like "food" or "house" or "car" money and I think I want to spend it on herding lessons. BUT before we can do more of that I really need to teach Monty a reliable 'down' and 'wait'. He has a pretty sucky down and wait. He does slightly better at a stand or sit and wait, but it's really all bad due to my lack of training it. I can usually teach a pretty good stay, but Monty loves to push every button known to man and I need to be more consistent about not letting him do that.

I think a year is a reasonable time line to get a good solid 'wait' and 'down' on the herding field (and agility and obedience) and get some good practice with the sheep and be ready for HT or PT come the national.

Once he gets a good wait and down, we could then do rally and agility. For agility I will also need to teach him weaves. He does everything else. Has generally nice solid contacts, keeps the bars up, knows the other obstacles minus the weaves.

Then at the national we could do- herding, agility and rally. Which would be more than enough and could be fun.

So my list for Monty is-

Reliable drop and down.
Reliable sit, stand and down stay
Weaves
Precision Heeling (he does a nice loose leash walking right now but not competition ready)
Train for HT or PT on sheep

I have a year, now to get cracking!

My have we come a long way

For those that don't know, I got Monty because he's a resource guarder. His last home didn't give him a job, so he invented one for himself. Food objects mostly, which he tries to inhale at lightening speed regardless of the consequences just so that no one else can have it. We've worked a lot on his guarding since day one he was home, and he has improved tremendously and last night just showed how much.

Sunday night is garbage night here at my house. And last night I was really, really stupid. I currently have a cat that I'm borrowing to combate a mice problem, and my usual way of doing garbage is I go down clean the cat box, bring that bag of garbage upstairs, empty the kitchen trash then take those 2 bags outside to the trash barrel and move it to the street. Except last night I did it backwards. And it could have ended really, really badly.

I emptied the kitchen trash, and LEFT the full plastic trash bag Right In the Middle of the kitchen floor, right where Monty could get it. I completely forgot about his thing with food. He's been so good lately. I went into the basement to do the cat boxes and ask I came up the stairs I saw 3 flat coats staring at me, but no cardi. And went "Oh shit."

He had torn a hole in the garbage bag and was eating a cooked duck carcass left over from dinner the other night. Not good. He'd gotten a few good crunches into it, when I told him, "Mont, can we not do this? You're going to kill yourself." He let me scruff him, and he dropped it, I put it in the sink, picked up the garbage bag (he's still scruffed, as he'll just dive back into it if I let go) and then let him go. It was all rather painless. I got the garbage outside. Came in, fed him some bread to hopefully prevent any bones from perforating his insides and we went to bed.

All I could think of was how a 6 months or a year ago that incident would have been a massive fight. He would have hung onto that carcass until I'd practically cut off his airway to get him to drop it. He didn't do that last night. He would have sworn at me until the cows came home as I cleaned up the mess. He didn't do that last night.

He's come a long way my little short dog. Still gets into trouble, but it's a lot easier to get him out of it now than it ever used to be. Which is rather a huge relief. The work has paid off.

Visit with 'D'

Monty has a little friend who we'll call D here for the sake of anonymity. D is a little boy about 5 years old and he's autistic but he constantly talks about dogs to his parents. It's at the point where they ask him if he wants a baby brother and sister and he says, "NO, Dog!" I hear about D all the time at painting class and that's how his grandmother got the idea to give D for Christmas 6 visits with Monty. Today was our 1st visit.

Overall I think it went rather well. I had brought some buscuit shaped cookies and Monty's quacky stuffed duck for us to play with. At 1st D was very shy and didn't want to talk to Monty other than say 'Hi' and really was nervous coming up and didn't want to pet him or Mont to touch him. So instead he played with his little race cars and talked about his cars and told Monty and me all about them. Then D decided that playing fetch with the duck would be fun especially since the duck 'quacks' rather than squeaks. So we did that for a while. Throught out the half hour we were there D kept getting braver and braver and closer and closer to Monty and in the end he even let Mont sniff his leg without getting nervous.

Finally when it was time to leave D had a little melt down because he wanted Monty to stay, but he did with his dad's help give Monty a good bye cookie and settled down and said good bye after that and was told that Monty will come back to visit him again.

So I think it was a good visit and Monty did well. He's such a good little corgi boy.

Holly my friend from Visions tagged us for a new game. I have to think about who each dog would be if he were human (personality wise), in general or as a specific person.

Ok so here goes:

James (6.5yrs)- James, who is James? I don't know a lot of people, but if James were human he'd be a middle age geiser going "when I was a kid, I never would have done anything like that!" when we all well know he was 1st in line to pull those kinds of teenage stunts.

Niche (4yrs)- No question Niche is a jock. He will go all day every day working out and then some. And wants all the ladies. But underneath he really doesn't have the confidence to back himself up.

Monty (4yrs)- He's an Imp. Well those aren't human, but he still is one. He's got a mischievous streak a mile wide. But he's still incredibly lovable and cuddly.

Obi (10months)- I'd have to say Obs is Richard Feynman (the physicist). A hard working geek with a huge sense of humor who as a whiz kid was fixing neighborhood transistor radios during the great depression and setting his hands on fire in his magic tricks show.

No surgery!

I dropped Monty off at the vet’s this morning and told them that the growth had gone down significantly (even more so from last night to this morning) and that if the vet checked it and felt he didn’t need surgery today to give me a call. Well about a half hour later I got a call that my vet checked the growth and felt it had gone down even more and wasn’t as rock hard so wants to continue antibiotics and recheck in a week. So no surgery for Monty! I am relieved! I picked him up and he’s back home.